This invention is related to the communications industry and, more particularly, to a method and system for interconnecting communication devices responsive to customer orders.
The explosion of today""s telecommunications market of various communications providers, different equipment manufacturers, types of equipment, multitudes of services and locations has become one of the biggest challenges for telecommunications companies. The provisioning of equipment, services, maintaining constant changes and updates has become a very costly and labor intensive process.
Also, many telecommunications companies are now getting into several different service offerings beyond Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) such as Internet Service Provider, Voice Messaging, Wireless Services, Cable Television, ISDN, XDSL, as well as many others. When a customer calls in asking for one or more services, many times the provisioning order requires the activation of many different network components or communication devices. Provisioning, for example, conventionally requires numerous personnel and countless hours to determine which pieces of equipment or devices for what services require what changes, activations, and/or turn-ups. Multiple devices or equipment often need to be configured for a single order. Customer data, service type, and other information all have to be entered manually on multiple terminals. This process can be a very time consuming and costly necessity.
Some provisioning systems have been developed in attempts to address some of these concerns. Examples of such systems can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 5,680,390 by Robrock, II titled xe2x80x9cBroadband Telecommunications Network And Method Of Having Operations Systems Supportxe2x80x9d and U.S. Pat. No. 5,848,141 by Beck et al. titled xe2x80x9cMethod And Apparatus For Provisioning Call Processing Records Using Logic And Data Templates.xe2x80x9d These prior systems, however, are quite complex, costly, require extensive hardware and/or software, and only focus on a specific portion of the overall system or a specific customized application. In other words, such systems are not flexible enough and portable enough to be used on a wide variety of interconnecting or provisioning applications and fail to take into account the constraints on the entire system.
In view of the foregoing, the present invention advantageously provides a method and system for more effectively and flexibly interconnecting communications equipment or devices. The present invention also advantageously provides a method and system for automatically provisioning communications equipment or devices responsive to an entry from a customer system or order entry interface where a service request is electronically entered. The present invention additionally advantageously provides a simplified and portable system and method which can be used on a wide variety of communications equipment or devices. The present invention further advantageously provides customer interface personnel, users or application specialists, and communications companies more degrees of freedom to accomplish various interconnecting functions such as provisioning.
More particularly, a method of provisioning communication devices according to the present invention at least preferably includes the steps of retrieving at least one predetermined provisioning rule from a rule database responsive to a due customer order and executing a provisioning script representative of instructions for provisioning a plurality of communication devices, such as telecommunication devices, to provide a customer selected service responsive to the at least one retrieved provisioning rule. The step of executing a script preferably includes determining if the rule database includes a predetermined provisioning rule.
The method can also advantageously include generating a customer order including data representative of a transaction type and an order sequence for performing the transaction and retrieving a due customer order from an order database. The due customer order also includes the transaction type. The step of retrieving a due customer order preferably includes the step of polling the order database for a pending transaction type. The method can additionally include logging data in the order database representative of customer orders which have been provisioned so as to define a logged audit trail.
The present invention also provides a system for provisioning communication devices, and more particularly telecommunication devices. The system preferably includes customer order interfacing means for interfacingly receiving a customer service order, rule-based script provision selecting means positioned in communication with the customer order interfacing means for selecting a rule-based script to provision communication devices, and communication devices interfacing means positioned in communications with the rule-based script provision generating means for interfacingly providing the rule-based script to communication devices to thereby perform a provisioning request thereon.
The customer order interfacing means preferably includes an input scripted provisioning driver, and the communication devices interfacing means preferably includes an output scripted provisioning driver. The rule-based script provision selecting means preferably includes a provisioning engine having a customer order database for storing customer orders therein. The customer order includes a transaction type. The rule-based script provision selecting means also includes a rule database for storing a plurality of provisioning rules therein and a rule-based executor responsive to the customer order database and the rule database for executing a provisioning script based upon the transaction type of a customer order.